A 1971 column written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Samuel T. Busey’s discovery of oil in Union County begins with a bit of breathless myth-making.
“It is not a forgotten day or hour, that time shortly after 4 p.m. Jan. 10, 1921! Although it was fifty years ago today, many local people still recall the late afternoon the Busey well ‘blew in’ some two miles west of El Dorado on the south side of what is now Highway 82,” the article states.
Columnist Clayte Whitten indeed had the privilege - writing in 1971 - of having on hand local citizens who were alive to witness that day in 1921. One quoted is “Mrs. M.H. Winchester”, a boarding house owner, who remembered seeing “a cloud of oil and gas soaring high above the derrick,” and recalled the excitement that gripped the community immediately after.
The sense was surely palpable that accompanying that dark “cloud” - part of a “gusher well that sprayed between 3,000 and 10,000 barrels of oil up to a mile away,” according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas- was the future.
Not to mention the money.
Even the most cursory glimpse at Census numbers shows that El Dorado’s population jumped from 3,887 in 1920 to 16,421 in 1930. At the peak of that first boom the population surged to almost 30,000 people in 1925.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says that 59 oil companies existed in El Dorado as of 1923 along with thirteen oil operators and 22 oil production companies, an unfathomable transformation of what had been a sleepy agricultural community of fewer than 4,000 three years earlier.
Geologist and developer Richard Mason said that the 1922 discovery of the Smackover Pool is what, after a decline in productivity, reignited the frenzy.
“It created such excitement here that 120 other wells were drilled all over the county and some of those found pretty good oil. What happened: production went up, but about two years later it started to drop. They happened to drill over here by Smackover - the Smackover Field, the biggest oil field in Arkansas. The first well was in the gas part and blew out, making a big crater you could put the [Union County] courthouse in. But when they drilled on the edge of the field and got good oil wells… That kicked the boom into high gear. The Smackover Field still produces,” Mason said.
The infrastructure was ill-prepared for such a rush of people and equipment.
In the stereotypical image of the boom town, masses of tents and shacks were thrown up to house the sudden influx.
Fortune seekers arrived with heavy equipment and teams of oxen and mules to face dirt or gravel roads and an unpredictable climate.
“Mule Skinner Corner is where they would hitch up their mules and oxen to haul equipment from the train station to the oil field… Some of the equipment was so heavy, trucks then weren’t big enough to carry them, so they’d use these teams of mules and oxen to haul it out to the El Dorado field or to Smackover,” Mason said.
Conditions on the roads could change vastly based on the weather. Mason went on to explain that “plank operators” would charge travelers to place wooden planks on the road to make the morass passable.
Downtown El Dorado transformed over the next decade, fed by the torrent of money and the necessity of change.
“All that money came pouring in, they scraped off all these old frame buildings and built all new buildings. Almost all these buildings, including the courthouse, were built between 1921 and 1930. The guys here running the town, came back from WWI having seen all these grand buildings [in Europe]. So they had this vision, and with the money and vision, you can do a lot of things,” Mason said.
Following those early madcap days exemplified by the eccentric globetrotting figure of Dr. Busey and the overflow of speculators and fortune-seekers, an “industrial elite,” as described in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, became the central figures of the next phase. The industrialists - Thomas H. Barton, Charles Murphy - established empires still operating today.
The local economy has remained tied inextricably to oil in one way or another since that initial boom.
Production was frenzied in the early years. According to the EoA, 73,000,000 barrels of oil were produced in 1925 alone.
These absurd rates of production caused some wells to run dry “within five years of the boom,” while improper storage led to huge losses in 1926 in Smackover.
The first boom came to an end by the late 1920s, but oil as an industry was in Union County to stay, bolstered by the discovery of new pools in the 1930s and 40s that fed a second, smaller boom lasting until the 1960s.
Although the tent cities and dirt roads are long since relegated to memory and gray-toned photos, a sightseeing trip around El Dorado and Union County quickly reveals signs - from the Murphy Arts District to the oil derricks in use in El Dorado and Smackover - that the boom still reverberates today.